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<font size=2>November 23, 2011<br>
<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/11/23/the-return-of-the-albuquerque-death-squads/" eudora="autourl">
http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/11/23/the-return-of-the-albuquerque-death-squads/</a>
<br><br>
Police War on the Poor<br><br>
</font><h1><b>The Return of the Albuquerque Death
Squads</b></h1><font size=2>by DAVID CORREIA<br><br>
<i>Albuquerque.<br><br>
</i>On November 13 of this year the Albuquerque police oversight
commission cleared one of its own for the fatal shooting in September of
2010 of 19-year old Chandler Barr. The officer, a bicycle cop on her
first day on the job, shot the mentally ill Barr twice in the chest after
he threatened her with a butter knife. Barr is one of 20 young men shot
by Albuquerque police in the last two years, and one of 14 dead from
their injuries. The long list of young menmostly Hispanic and many of
them mentally ill or drug usersincudes also Dominic Robert Smith shot
and killed on October 1, 2009 by an officer that, according to Margaret
Ann Saiz, Robert’s mother, “said that my soon looked like he was mentally
retarded.” Smith was behaving erratically and shoving pills in his mouth
when an Albuquerque Police officer, using his favorite hunting rifle,
fired a round into the unarmed man’s chest.<br><br>
In May of this year Mark Gomez found his brother Alan high on drugs and
“acting crazy.” Not knowing how to intervene and scared that his brother
would hurt himself, he called 911. Alan Gomez became another statistic
when an APD officer shot him in the back. Gomez was armed at the time
with a plastic spoon.<br><br>
On February 9, 2011, APD officer Trey Economidy pulled over Jacob
Mitschelen on a traffic violation. Economidy claimed Mitschelen ran from
the scene with a weapon in his hand. Mitschelen’s mother asked “They had
him down with the first shot, why did they have to go up and pump two
more shots in him?”<br><br>
One answer to the question, both the specific question regarding any one
of the 14 deaths and the more general question about the spike in Police
shootings, may be that APD officers are violent by nature, self-selected
to the force because of the opportunity to kill with impunity. The
numbers seems to suggest as much. Police killings in Albuquerque are
three-times what is found in comparably sized cities and is similar to
New York, which has 14-times the population and a police force 34-times
larger than APD.<br><br>
And there’s ample evidence of a frightening blood lust among some APD
officers. Trey Economidy, the police shooter in the Mitschelen death,
posted his job description on Facebook as “human waste disposal.” He was
suspended for four days. Detective Jim Dwyer listed his occupation as
“oxygen thief removal technician” on his MySpace page, a page that
included alarming posts like “Some people are only alive because killing
them is illegal.” Police Chief Ray Schultz called some of his posts
“concerning” and “very clearly inappropriate,” but refused to discipline
Dwyer.<br><br>
There exists, however, another possibility. The refusal by APD leadership
to discipline officers (none of the officers involved in any of the
shootings has been removed from the force), and the refusal of Mayor
Richard Berry to seek an independent, outside investigation by the
Department of Justice (The Albuquerque City Council voted in August to
request the investigation but Berry remains intransigent in his support
for the troops), suggests that what’s developing in Albuquerque is a
frightening return to the extrajudicial police shootings that turned
1970s Albuquerque into a killing field. Endemic violence in New Mexico
against Native Americans and racialized policing patterns focused on
young, Chicano men began to shift in the early 1970s in reaction to the
rise of Red Power and Chicano Movement groups into efforts to target and
kill Chicano and Indigenous activists by the dozens.<br><br>
In 1969 a Vista volunteer named Bobby Garcia disappeared and was later
found in an arroyo with a bullet in the back of his head. The killing
marked the moment when activists throughout the state began to see a
pattern in the violence. A series of police shootings and the deaths of
almost a dozen Chicano activists from Taos to Albuquerque, some unarmed
and shot in the back, produced rumors of death squads operating within
the Albuquerque Police Department and the New Mexico State
Police.<br><br>
And the evidence began piling up along with the bodies. On February 28,
1972 Rito Canales and Antonio Cordova were killed in a barrage of gunfire
while the two were reportedly trying to steal dynamite from a roadside
construction bunker. Both men were members of a group known as the Black
Berets, a multi-ethnic, community-based social movement organization
modeled on the Black Panthers and inspired by Che Guevara. Canales and
Cordova were outspoken and prominent community activists, particularly on
issues of police brutality, New Mexico prison conditions and the
institutional racism facing Chicano communities in New Mexico. Their
organization operated a free community health clinic (named in honor of
Bobby Garcia), established cultural schools for Chicano preschoolers,
organized film nights and offered tutoring sessions for local teenagers,
among other things. Members traveled to Cuba on Venceremos Brigades,
brought Vietnamese students to Albuquerque to talk about the war in
Vietnam, and provided childcare for local union members during
strikes.<br><br>
Their killing came the day before both were scheduled to hold a news
conference on an investigation into prison violence and police brutality.
Police had been harassing the Black Berets for years before the Canales
and Cordova shootings. As one former Black Beret leaders recalls it “[The
police] would pull out their guns while their vehicle was driving and say
‘Bang, Bang’.” The Berets, it seems, uncovered evidence of a secret
interagency group called the Metro Squad, made up of officers from APD
and the New Mexico State Police along with Bernalillo County Sheriff’s
Deputies and involvement from federal agents. The Metro Squad worked with
the John Birch Society, the Minutemen, and other reactionary groups who
opposed civil rights.<br><br>
The killings of Chicano activists should also be understood as part of a
much larger pattern of violence that included, and made possible, police
violence.<br><br>
John Harvey and Herrman Benally were murdered on April 21, 1974. After
being stripped of their clothes, they were beaten with rocks, castrated
with burning sticks and set on fire. The men were found in a ditch along
a dusty stretch of highway outside the Navajo nation in Northwest New
Mexico. Less than a week later, a third Navajo man was found in a ditch.
Like Harvey and Benally, David Ignacio was beaten savagely. His attackers
left him to die from suffocation after caving in his chest with
rocks.<br><br>
The April deaths came during a bloody spring as ten violent deaths rocked
the Navajo nation and turned the initial horror into an almost weekly
event. In the days following the discovery of Ignacio, 60 people called
the funeral home wondering if he were a missing relative. When three
white Farmington, New Mexico high school students confessed to the
murders, stories of constant racial violence in the area came to light.
The murders, it turns out, were a consequence of a blood sport among
Farmington high school students who for years had made robbing, beating,
and mutilating inebriated men outside the scores of liquor stores that
ringed the Navajo nation into a weekly Saturday night event. Some white
students at Farmington, it seems, displayed the cut-off fingers of their
Navajo victims in their lockers. Until the tortures and murders were
revealed the cause of death for the dozens of Navajo men found dead in
the ditches along lonely highways was said to be “exposure” from passing
out following drinking bouts. Meanwhile the police, some remarked at the
time, continued to recruit at the local high school for new
cadets.<br><br>
In Albuquerque the Berets went public with their claims of police
brutality at a rally that turned into a pitched street battle with police
and Anglo provocateurs. In Farmington, young Navajo activists of the
Coalition for Navajo Liberation marched in the streets against violence
until the Sheriff’s posse showed up. The ensuing melee sent dozens of
marchers to the hospital and the rest to jail.<br><br>
The violence and police killings of the 1970s have returned. But there
are differences between the violence of the 1970s and the eruption of
this new pattern of police violence. The killings in the 1970s should be
placed in the context of liberation movement activism around civil rights
issues by groups like the Black Berets and the Coalition for Navajo
Liberation. The killings today find another context, namely three decades
of a bulldozing neoliberal restructuring that has ground its way through
poor communities amid the parallel expansion of a violent and
dehumanizing drug economy.<br><br>
There are, however, similarities. Police violence against civil rights
activists in the 1970s was a function of the way in which race and class
became a proxy for subversion by the agents of social control such as the
police. In the strange logic of the Albuquerque Police Department, poor,
urban Chicanos became targets of police violence because of the social
chaos that racism and poverty had created. Likewise today, APD is at war
with the poor because it has come to equate any expression of poverty or
drug addiction not as an effect of structural inequality, but rather as
another opportunity to dispose of what its officers call “human waste.”
Like elsewhere being poor, suffering from a mentally illness or battling
a drug addiction is a crime. Dwyer was wrong, detectives like Enconomidy
and Dwyer have thrived at APD because for the Albuquerque Police
Department, killing is not an illegal act.<br><br>
<b><i>David Correia</b> is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at
the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. He was inspired to write
about Police violence in Albuquerque by the work of an anonymous graffiti
artist whose art can be found along the railroad tracks in Albuquerque.
He can be reached at dcorreia(at)unm.edu<br><br>
<br><br>
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